The Daily 202: North Korea my-button-is-bigger brinkmanship again spotlights Trump's fixation on size

James Hohmann, The Washington Post

Published 5:13 am, Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Following President Donald Trump's tweets can feel like watching a short man drive a Hummer. His fragile ego is always looking to overcompensate. The latest manifestation of that is downright Napoleonic.

North Korean leader Kim John Un said Monday that the United States is "within the range of our nuclear strike and a nuclear button is always on the desk of my office."

Twelve minutes after Fox News highlighted that quote Tuesday night, Trump tweeted: "Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"

This isn't the first time Trump has made a thinly veiled allusion to his manhood. During the Republicans primaries, he gave Marco Rubio the nickname "Little Marco" and the Florida senator eagerly joined him in the gutter. "He's like 6'2", which is why I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5'2'," Rubio said during a rally. "Have you seen his hands? And you know what they say about men with small hands!"

Trump brought up the insult during a debate the next night, holding up his hands for the audience to inspect: "Are they small hands? He referred to my hands: 'If they are small, something else must be small.' I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee you!"

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Our in-house fact checkers tabulate that Trump has made 1,950 false or misleading claims over the past 347 days. Many are exaggerations about the hugeness of something he's taking credit for. For example, Trump has repeated the falsehood that he's passing "the biggest tax cut ever" at least 53 times, even though his own Treasury Department's data shows it is the eighth biggest.

"I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A.," Trump told the New York Times last week, one of 24 misleading or false claims he made during a 30-minute interview.

-- There are many other areas where the 71-year-old has made clear he believes size matters, such as:

His bank account: Trump has long exaggerated his net worth and business success. Rhona Graff, the president's longtime personal assistant, told Crain's New York Business last year that the Trump Organization had $9.5 billion in annual revenue. But financial disclosure forms indicate that the company only generates between $600 million and $700 million in annual revenue, less than one-tenth what they claim. The Trump Organization moved from third to 40th on Crain's list of the largest privately held companies in New York this year, based on public filings.

His buildings: Trump Tower is only 58 floors, but Trump and his company continue to falsely claim that there are 68. He says that his personal penthouse there is 33,000 square feet, but Forbes checked land records and it's only 10,996. During an interview on Sept. 11, 2001, Trump told a New York television station that the collapse of the World Trade Center meant that this property at 40 Wall Street was no longer the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan. "Now it's the tallest," he said.

His crowd sizes: During a phone call on the Saturday morning after he became president, Trump personally ordered the acting director of the National Park Service to produce additional photographs of the crowds on the Mall. Trump also expressed anger over a retweet sent from the agency's account, in which side-by-side photographs showed far fewer people at his swearing-in than had shown up to see Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009. During the campaign, he drew huge crowds but still routinely inflated the numbers.

His 2016 victory: Trump has said he had "the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan." In fact, Obama won more electoral votes in both of his elections. So did Bill Clinton in 1996 and 1992. And George H.W. Bush in 1988. Trump's electoral college victory actually ranks 46th in 58 elections.

-- The latest from the Peninsula: "South Korea announced that a long-suspended cross-border hotline with North Korea reopened on Wednesday to pave the way for official talks between the two sides about sending a delegation from the North to next month's Winter Olympics in the South," The Post's Simon Denyer reports. "North Korea had earlier in the day announced the channel would be reopened, marking an easing of tensions . . . U.S. officials said they doubt Kim's sincerity but declared that Washington would not stand in the way, nor would it allow the North to drive a wedge between South Korea and the United States."

-- North Korean dictators have been insulting American presidents for seven decades, but Trump is the first to let their taunts get under his skin. He had scaled back his "fire and fury" rhetoric since the summer at the behest of his foreign policy advisers. This week he's back to calling the 33-year-old "Rocket Man." (Kim's preferred insult for Trump is "dotard.")

When Hillary Clinton said during the 2016 campaign that Trump could be easily baited by foreign leaders, he shot back on ABC: "I have one of the great temperaments. I have a winning temperament!"

-- Is there a method to the madness? The most charitable explanation for Trump's taunts is that he's embracing Richard Nixon's "madman theory" of foreign policy. The idea here is that North Korea is more likely to make concessions if it believes that the threat of United States military action is credible because Trump is crazy enough to use nuclear weapons.

To understand why it's dangerous for Trump to tweet this way toward Kim, it's worth revisiting op-eds from this summer by the German Marshall Fund's Laura Rosenberger (a former director for North Korea policy on the National Security Council) and the Hoover Institution's Kori Schake (who has worked for Republicans at State, DOD and the White House).

"I guess the president regards this as a show of strength. But as everybody who's ever been in a first-grade playground recognizes, it's usually the person who's most aggressively pounding their chest that is, in fact, the weak one on the playground," Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., a member of the House intelligence committee, said Tuesday night on CNN.

-- Susan Glasser has a meaty piece in Politico Magazine about Trump's foreign policy naivete. "It's worse than you think," she argues. Two memorable nuggets:

1. From Trump's September dinner in New York with leaders of four Latin American countries on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly: "'Rex tells me you don't want me to use the military option in Venezuela,' the president told the gathered leaders, according to an account offered by an attendee soon after the dinner. 'Is that right? Are you sure?' Everyone said they were sure. But they were rattled. War with Venezuela, as absurd as that seemed, was clearly still on Trump's mind. . . . By the time the dinner was over, the leaders were in shock, and not just over the idle talk of armed conflict . . .

"A former senior U.S. official with whom I spoke was briefed by ministers from three of the four countries that attended the dinner. 'Without fail, they just had wide eyes about the entire engagement,' the former official told me. Even if few took his martial bluster about Venezuela seriously, Trump struck them as uninformed about their issues and dangerously unpredictable, asking them to expend political capital on behalf of a U.S. that no longer seemed a reliable partner. 'The word they all used was: 'This guy is insane.''

2. An unnamed senior European official recounted a "frightening" conversation with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has an international portfolio that includes trying to negotiate Middle East peace: "Kushner was 'very dismissive' about the role of international institutions and alliances and uninterested in the European's recounting of how closely the United States had stood together with Western Europe since World War II. 'He told me, 'I'm a businessman, and I don't care about the past. Old allies can be enemies, or enemies can be friends. 'So, the past doesn't count,' the official recalled. 'I was taken aback.'"

-- Twitter was consumed overnight by Trump's saber-rattling.

From a former senior staffer on the National Security Council under George W. Bush:

"A Twitter spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday night that Trump's North Korea tweets do not amount to a 'specific threat,' and thus do not warrant disciplinary action," Business Insider reports. "The spokesperson pointed to Twitter's policy on violent threats and glorification of violence: 'You may not make specific threats of violence or wish for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people,' the rule states."

-- Finally, for what it's worth, there is not actually a button Trump can press to launch nukes. There is, however, a button that lets him order Diet Cokes.